I finally made it to Somerset House to view the Guy Bourdin exhibition this weekend, if you haven’t gone already you should head there straight away as the show is running until the 15th March 2015 and it is amazing!!

Guy Bourdin was a French photographer (1928-1991) who is known for taking genius and provocative fashion pictures. His work is very special because unlike a lot of fashion photography Bourdin would always build a complex narrative for the shoot, creating images full of beauty, simple elegance, erotica, and surrealism.

The picture below is incredible and so sophisticated!!

Photograph: Guy Bourdin/Somerset House

I really loved Bourdin’s commercial work for the fashion and shoe designer Charles Jourdan. They worked closely together between 1967 and 1981 on numerous campaigns. A lot of the imagery shows the products in unexpected ways, deconstructing the model’s role, and most of the time only showing parts of their bodies.

Photograph:Guy Bourdin / Somerset House

He did an amazing series of photos while on holidays in England, where he shot shoes worn by a pair of mannequin legs, as if they were a real model. The legs are walking in the street, sat on a bench at a train station, running in a field, taking a bath, in bed as if they were a real body. The space around the model is very important, and always tells a story, you want to know why is the model there? What is the context etc..